I was curious whether there were any local Stack Overflow meetups yet (in a similar vein to jQuery meetups). The idea is that Stack Overflow people within a geographical area would get together at a local bar or something and talk code, SO, or whatever other common interests are shared amongst the attendees.

This brings up a few questions:

If there are already meetups happening, what's the "official site"?

If not, I'd love to start a Stack Overflow Philly meetup and meet some of my fellow community members.

What would be the best way to spread the word to the users in my geographical area? The first thing that comes to mind would be asking for a shout out on the podcast, but unfortunately at the time of writing the podcast is going dark for a little while and is to return with a new format.

5 Answers
5

April 6, 2011 will be was World-Wide Stack Overflow MeetUp Day per this blog post. Organization of specific events is being was left up to individual users.

(Do not confuse this event with the 2010 Stack Overflow party, which is mentioned in Joel's answer to this question!)

EDIT:
Wow, this answer was stale. MeetUp Day is now long-gone, but the meetup.com groups that it generated are still around. The SE team hasn't announced plans for any centrally organized followups as of this edit, but community members are welcome — even encouraged — to use those groups to set up their own meetups.

While it's not a social networking site, it is a community and a really good one at that. I would be interested in meeting the other members of the community face to face and I suspect others would as well.
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Josh KodroffMar 17 '10 at 14:44

@Josh: I don't disagree with you. I wouldn't mind a few networking things built into SO myself...
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RSolbergMar 17 '10 at 14:45

I actually came here to ask the same thing! Except I was thinking it would be cool to instead of just get together and talk about code, to actually get together and write code. Then you could have people nearby who you can ask questions of, just like you do on stackoverflow.com, except in person. People could work on open source or find some help with a particularly pernicious problem or make a fun game together.

We could get together, hack and exchange ideas... It could be called "Hack Exchange"!

Hack Exchange local meetups. There is a store near my house where people get together and play board games all the time. It would be cool to have a variation on the internet cafe where your intention is to go and actually interact with people and do something just for the fun and community of it.